Hollywood’s latest effort to reinvigorate a cash cow ransacks James Cameron’s lean landmark actioners Terminator and its sequel Terminator 2: Judgment Day, lifting all the obvious touchstones from the franchise (yes, even Terminator Salvation) while rewriting Terminator history and fundamentally altering not only key characters, but the rules of the world.

TERMINATOR 5 TERMINATOR REBOOT WATCH TERMINATOR GENISYS ONLINE.TERMINATOR GENISYS MOVIE FREE.Call it blasphemy, or opportunism. The canonical rejiggering is made possible with a screenwriting trick cribbed from another Paramount sci-fi reboot, Star Trek, which also sent beloved characters hurtling through time to justify creating alternate timelines, exploit rabid fan adulation, and craft new rulebooks for the franchise.

TERMINATOR 5 TERMINATOR REBOOT WATCH TERMINATOR GENISYS ONLINE.TERMINATOR GENISYS MOVIE FREE.In Terminator: Genisys that means some things stay the same, while others spin so wildly out of orbit not even explosive set pieces or endless Terminator-on-Terminator fistfights can distract from the nonsense. Back to the Future experts who’ve dedicated hours to mapping out that franchise’s messy timelines will have a field day trying to sort out these paradoxical timelines.

TERMINATOR 5 TERMINATOR REBOOT WATCH TERMINATOR GENISYS ONLINE.TERMINATOR GENISYS MOVIE FREE.John Connor (Jason Clarke), the untouchable leader of the resistance, sends Reese back to 1984 to save his mother from an android assassin assigned to kill her, thus ensuring that the future never happens. But an unforeseen event conveniently strikes precisely at the moment Reese is being transported mid-time travel—a “nexus point” that has a ripple effect on the film’s sci-fi logic, as later explained by an unlikely character spouting quantum physics mumbo jumbo we’ve never had to know before.

TERMINATOR 5 TERMINATOR REBOOT WATCH TERMINATOR GENISYS ONLINE.TERMINATOR GENISYS MOVIE FREE.The entire point of this $170 million exercise in studio-scale fanfic is to re-envision iconic characters and storylines in “What If?” scenarios popular enough to carve out two or three more big-budget sequels.

In that instant, Terminator: Genisys changes its past while needlessly overcomplicating the science that’s ruled the Terminator universe for 31 years.

TERMINATOR 5 TERMINATOR REBOOT WATCH TERMINATOR GENISYS ONLINE.TERMINATOR GENISYS MOVIE FREE.In this new alternate timeline, Reese lands in a 1984 Los Angeles painstakingly recreated from the original film, from the alleyway swirling with blue electric energy to the bewildered homeless guy to the pair of Nike Vandals he cops in a department store. He meets the woman of his dystopian dreams, Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke), but she’s not the helpless young waitress in distress he was expecting.

TERMINATOR 5 TERMINATOR REBOOT WATCH TERMINATOR GENISYS ONLINE.TERMINATOR GENISYS MOVIE FREE.She’s Khaleesi in a leather jacket and sensible ponytail, and it’s she who saves Reese from an Asian T-1000 made of lethal liquid metal (Korean star Byung-hun Lee) while barking, “Come with me if you want to live.” Unlike Linda Hamilton’s iconic Sarah Connor, who fell for the futuristic hunk assigned to protect her and then transformed into a badass after getting pregnant with humanity’s salvation in one of the best sequels of all time—this Sarah resists her maternal destiny.

TERMINATOR 5 TERMINATOR REBOOT WATCH TERMINATOR GENISYS ONLINE.TERMINATOR GENISYS MOVIE FREE.The entire point of this $170 million exercise in studio-scale fanfic is to re-envision iconic characters and storylines in “What If?” scenarios popular enough to carve out two or three more big-budget sequels. And so, meek characters become instant heroes, heroes become villains, and robots become human… kinda.